A farmer changing face of the Monaro

Empty shops have been filled due to a street renewal rent subsidy policy,  jobs are on the rise due to a myriad of new employers, including a Defence Department call centre  and major new opportunities from the proposed Snowy Hydro expansion.

 It’s a buzz the town has only sporadically felt since the halcyon days of the Snowy Scheme, when the town supported four nightclubs and four male barbers. While there has been much disquiet in NSW over forced council mergers, the Snowy-Monaro merger appears set in rock, despite some bitterness in some quarters of the old Snowy Rivers and Bombala shire areas. 

Farmer Dean Lynch didn’t waste time when he moved from his job as Cooma-Monaro mayor to Snowy-Monaro administrator last year. In some ways, the reins had finally been released. The Angus cattle breeder has always been hands on.

The first thing he did in his job was to get on the phone to marketing guru Peter Sheppard, who had headed Snowy Tourism. Sheppard framed the famous “Queensland, beautiful one day, perfect the next” line. For Cooma, he invented “So much to love”, a tagline now emblazoned on poles and stickers down Sharp Street. Other town taglines are being fed out in the new council area including Delegate “Experience history”, Adaminaby “Big trout country”, Bombala “Platypus country” and  Jindabyne “Australia’s highest playground”.

It’s all about attracting extra tourist dollars. Mr Lynch says of the tourists who go to the Snowies in winter, only 60 per cent ski, the rest are looking for something to do. Another key Lynch plank has been to keep the 22-40 year-old’s in town by improving regional university education facilities, and enabling  diversity in business. A great innovation was the launch of a local business store card by the Cooma Chamber of Commerce. Chamber executive officer Karen McGufficke said the $144,000 worth of cards had been sold in the last nine months, of which $108,000 had been spent so far.  

As a farmer, Dean Lynch was well-aware of the vagaries of the seasons. He’s seen the good and the bad, the rough and the tough. The tough also as a rugby league player in country NSW and England, and experienced success as a coach of the Cooma Stallions and as Group 16 president. He had to help raise his family out of large bank debt when wool prices crashed in 1991, with the suspension of the reserve wool price scheme.  He had to get busy, he had to act to save the family farm west of Cooma, now an Angus stud, Kunuma, the highest stud in the Snowies.

It was a long road back to stability. He tried everything from running a successful chain of electrical shops to spreading crops.  Then Lynch turned to politics, sick, as he says “of politicians too weak to make decisions”. He became  Cooma shire mayor, then made an ill-fated run as a Clive Palmer candidate in the federal election.  The merger of Cooma-Monaro, Bombala  and Snowy River shires seemed inevitable by geography. “It is a natural, there are so many efficiencies we can effect here,” Lynch says. Agriculture he says, though, will always provide the backbone to the Snowy-Monaro region.